Who’s Consuming Whom? – A Roundtable Discussion

Who's Consuming Whom?

“Cultural appropriation includes people positioning otherness as exotic, high-priced consumables that contribute to white people’s wellness. To quote a thing I wrote in a story:

I am so, so tired of being eaten.”

–Amal El-Mohtar

Join three award-winning authors and editors as they dig into the roots of this dynamic in speculative fiction and publishing. Aliette de Bodard (The House of Shattered Wings), Amal El-Mohtar (Seasons of Glass and Iron), and Michi Trota (Uncanny Magazine) explore appropriation, colonialism, consumption, and how it all relates to writing the “Other”.

Roundtable Participants

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and three British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese Galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and forthcoming The House of Sundering Flames. Follow her on Twitter.

Amal El-Mohtar’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, and her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy TalesThe Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories, and The New Voices of Fantasy; in magazines such as Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside; and in her own collection of poems and very short stories, The Honey Month. A novella co-written with Max Gladstone and titled This Is How You Lose the Time War is forthcoming from Saga Press. Amal is the New York Times Book Review’s science fiction and fantasy columnist, and lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Follow her on Twitter.

Michi Trota is the Managing Editor/Nonfiction Editor of the Hugo Award-winning and World Fantasy Award finalist Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a three-time Hugo Award winner, and the first Filipina to win a Hugo Award. Michi is also an essayist who has been published in The Book Smugglers, The Establishment, and Invisible: An Anthology of Representation in SF/F, and the exhibit text writer for Worlds Beyond Here: Expanding the Universe of APA Science Fiction at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, WA. She’s spoken at C2E2, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and on NPR. Michi is a firespinner with the Raks Geek Fire+Bellydance troupe, past president of the Chicago Nerd Social Club Board of Organizers, and lives with her spouse and their two cats. Follow her on Twitter.

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